


it keeps on freezing

by CherryBonBon



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Blood and Injury, Character Death, Digging Your Way Out of Your Own Coffin Sucks, End Typical Descriptions of Death, Gen, Hypothermia, Nonbinary Character, Original Character Death(s), Original Character(s), Owen Harper Dead, Paradoxical Undressing, Statement Fic, Terminal Burrowing Behavor, The End
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-25
Updated: 2020-04-25
Packaged: 2021-03-01 23:00:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,039
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23834995
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CherryBonBon/pseuds/CherryBonBon
Summary: Statement of Morana Doležal regarding her life, death, and subsequent rebirth.(Content Warning list in notes)
Relationships: Minor or Background Relationship(s)
Kudos: 4





	it keeps on freezing

**Author's Note:**

> Content Warning list:  
> Death, and descriptions there of  
> Hypothermia and the things that go along with it  
> Being buried "alive"  
> Digging way out of coffin  
> Blood/Physical Injury  
> Loneliness themes
> 
> If you think anything else should be warned let me now and I'll add it.

I think I had a pretty normal life, all things considered. Maybe you wouldn’t call it normal. Maybe most people wouldn’t. But my family loved and supported me, I did well in school. I wasn’t the most popular but I had a couple friends. Maybe they were my brother’s friends who tolerated me, but he was always better with living people than I was. And my house wasn’t haunted even a little bit! All in all a pretty good life.

People thought it was weird though. I understand why. I guess it is strange, growing up with funeral directors as parents. They own a funeral home over in Edinburgh, where I’m from. Completely family run business. I hope it still is. That meant a lot to my dad, carrying on the family legacy. 

I mean he never pressured my brother and me to join up! He and Ma were always very clear that we could do whatever we wanted. They offered to pay for art school if I wanted to pursue my graphic design… maybe I should’ve taken them up on it. But death is in my blood. I have a passion for it. More than my art or poetry or anything else. I’m fascinated by it. So it wasn’t even a question when I became a mortician for the family funeral home. It’s what I was meant to do, ya know?

Maybe it’s weird to say, but I had a lot of fun at my job. I mean yea I was surrounded by dead people but I was also with my _family_. And I adore them! My parents stayed upstairs for the most part but they’d visit me downstairs sometimes. And then my brother would hang out with me whenever he wasn’t busy doing his thing. He would always show up to work with breakfast for the two of us and talk until he had to go out for a retrieval. My uncles would come to chat with me too. And my aunt and I always got lunch together, even after she retired. Sure I never managed to make many friends outside of my family but… I had them. And that’s all I ever really needed? I miss them a lot… they were always there for me and now I just… 

I hope my family is doing okay. I hope they’re handling this better than me. It was pretty sudden and all.

That being uh… my death. ‘Cause I’m dead. Undead? I’m still not sure how it works. But it happened about a month ago. There was this… body. My brother and uncle brought him in, usual as can be. We’d been expecting him actually— ward of the city, died a while back with no known next of kin and got put in storage while they looked for some. We have a contract with the city so we get some of those. People with no one to look after them so there’s just us left. His name was Arius Pantazis, heart attack. I felt bad for him. I always felt bad for the ones without family. I don’t really feel bad for him anymore.

Everything was normal about him! Standard dead body, nothing special. There was a communication problem with the medical examiner's office that was keeping him until he was transferred over to us so we didn’t get him until almost the end of the work day. And yea, I could’ve left him in the walk-in for the next day. But like I said! I felt bad for him. Respecting the dead is important and I didn’t want him to feel abandoned. So I set to work, even after the rest of my family left for the night. It wasn’t that weird, I’d been known to do it from time to time.

I had just finished preparing him and went to grab some water before putting him back in the fridge for the night and leaving. It was irresponsible— you shouldn’t leave bodies unattended, I know. But I was, like, crazy thirsty. And I didn’t see the harm in it!

He was gone when I came back. Just, like, totally gone. The room was empty. For a second I thought someone had broken in and stolen him but I’d only been gone for a couple minutes and the place was completely locked up, there was no way! So I assumed I’d just… put him back in the refrigerator already and forgotten. But I wanted to check to make sure. So I went into the walk-in to look. I like to keep the door propped open whenever I go in there because one time when I first started my aunt got locked in once and if I hadn’t been there— well.

It was the same time I realized the body wasn’t in there that I realized the door was closing. I turned and… I saw him. The body. Arius Pantazis. Slamming the walk-in door shut on me. I was shocked for a moment because, you know, that was a _dead body_. I knew he was dead. He’d been in a freezer at the medical examiner’s office for months. I’d pumped him full of embalming fluid. He was _dead_. But he’d also just locked me in.

I freaked. Threw myself against the door and screamed at him to let me out. For someone, anyone to help me. I don’t know how long I was at it but eventually my throat started hurting and I realized I was sweating. It’s… a bad idea to sweat when you’re in a cold environment. It saps away your body heat. I was so scared. A dead man had just locked me in the refrigerator with other dead people and no one would be able to get me out until my brother brought my breakfast in the morning because I had left my phone on my desk.

I paced the room for a little bit, but I started getting paranoid that it was making me sweat more so I stopped and sat down on the floor. Tried to keep my mind off what was happening by singing and quoting movies or books. I was shivering a lot but that was a good sign, shivering means your body is generating heat. It’s when you _stop_ shivering that you should be worried.

So I waited and sang and shivered and… it was getting colder. I couldn’t tell if it was a trick of being in there so long or reality but I’d been going in and out of that walk-in for years. I know how cold it’s supposed to be. And even with the added chill from my drying sweat it was _too cold_ to be normal. Like someone had turned the temperature way, way down. I know they did. Because I read the article about my death and it said the temperature in the walk-in was below freezing when it’s _supposed_ to be around 2 to 4 degrees. _Not the fucking negatives._

I was having trouble breathing after a while. And then I think I passed out because one moment I was sitting up and the next I was laying down, my head pounding like I’d cracked it against the floor falling. And I was getting frostbite on my fingers. I saw that and I… I freaked out again. It was like I forgot no one else was around again and I threw myself at the door to yell for help all over again. It hurt my hands to bang at the door but I did it anyway until I suddenly remembered what was going on. I did that a few times. Forget where I was and started screaming until it came back.

I remember thinking when I first got locked in _no matter how hot you start to feel, don’t take off your clothes_ because like… paradoxical undressing is a real bitch. And I knew that, logically. I’ve watched documentaries on hypothermia victims. I remember thinking it and promising myself that it wasn’t gonna get me but in the moment… in the moment I forgot and it was suddenly so hot I couldn’t bear it.

If you think suddenly realizing you’re locked in a walk-in refrigerator is scary, try suddenly realizing you’re locked in a walk-in refrigerator while naked and _burning up_. That really gets you screaming to be let out. But it didn’t work. I started pacing again, muttering to myself.

You know they like to talk about paradoxical undressing during hypothermia cases all the time. Like, you’re so cold your brain tricks you into thinking you’re hot and you take off your clothes. It’s so weird. But you know what they don’t talk about a lot? If you start doing it, it’s practically a guaranteed death sentence. You’re too far gone to be saved. _Terminal burrowing behavior_. It’s when a person experiencing hypothermia, after undressing, starts to crawl around on the floor before squeezing themselves into a small space. No one knows why they do it. Except, maybe, for me.

Because I was pacing around the room when suddenly I thought to myself _I need to get onto the floor_. It was vitally important. Like, ha, like I was going to die if I didn’t. So I got down into a little army crawl position and started slithering across the room to one of the corners, under a slab where a body was being kept. I just kept thinking over and over that this was how I was going to be safe, this was how I was going to survive. That little corner was going to save me. I was certain of it. That’s what people think when they develop terminal burrowing behavior. They think of safety. 

And once I was in that corner, tucked into myself, I felt calm. That was where I was meant to be. I just needed to wait and everything was going to be okay. I remember thinking that, through the false heat and difficulty breathing and residual fear— I was going to be okay if I just _waited_. And I did. Got more and more tired as time went on until I heard the door unlock and open. I didn’t go to it. Just stayed in my corner waiting, where I was supposed to be.

It was Arius Pantazis, of course. He crouched into my field of vision and reached his hand out to me. He asked me if I wanted to come with him, if I wanted to live. And I thought to myself… 

Death is a funny thing. It’s surrounded me my whole life, and I’d never been afraid of it until that night. It had been a welcome friend. A constant. Something I knew would come for me one day and then my family’s funeral home would take care of my body and I’d have a funeral where my family showed up and _maybe_ some of my colleagues out of respect. Some of my brother’s friends to show support. But nothing big or fancy. I would leave the world without making a big impression. My family would miss me but otherwise I would be easily forgotten. And I never really let that get to me. I was fine with just having my family. I wasn’t actually all that afraid of the act of dying that night. I was afraid of dying alone. Without the chance to ever tell my family goodbye. So he asked me if I wanted to live and I thought… _I’ll do whatever it takes. Give me life, even in death._

And as I tried to reach my hand out to his everything went dark. And I died.

I woke up and it was still dark. I wasn’t hot from my brain tricking me anymore, instead I was cold like when I’d first realized the temperature of the walk-in had been turned down. I wasn’t in the walk-in anymore but I knew where I was. I recognized the shape of that darkness, the feel of it pressing against my back where I laid down. My brother and I used to play hide and seek in the showroom coffins when we were kids because we were weird. So. I know when I’m in a coffin. I tried pushing it open, maybe I was hoping I hadn’t been buried yet, but I could smell the earth in the air. I knew the truth. The lid didn’t open. I was still stuck. I needed to dig my way out.

I think the hardest part was actually getting through the coffin. My parents didn’t really bury me with any digging instruments, not even something I could improvise with, so I had to… claw my way out. And let me tell you, scratching at a coffin lid takes time. It also takes your nails off. These are acrylics.

Eventually I got through the lid. As soon as I had a hole in it, dirt falling on me be damned, I started ripping it apart. And dirt fell on me as I broke through an opening large enough to crawl through and I shoved my hands into it, clawed through it to get up. About halfway through the earth I realized that despite the cloying pressure of it around me, I didn’t feel like I was suffocating. I didn’t need to breathe. Probably a good thing, considering how long it was taking me to break through.

I scratched my face up good. I scraped it against the wood of the coffin and dragged it against rocks. When I finally broke through the surface and dragged myself out of my grave I realized I was bleeding. But it was old blood. Rotten. Dark and slow oozing. I didn’t know what to do, alone in a cemetery, covered in dirt, and bleeding a dead person’s blood from my face and hands. So I just… started towards my flat. The streets were empty, it was the dead of night, but… there’s this homeless guy who sleeps near my flat. I always pass by him and give him some food or money. Chat a bit. We’re friends, kinda. And he was there. He saw me and jumped up, all worried. Asking what happened to me. And I just… 

I asked him if he knew he was going to die soon, cold and alone on the streets with no one to care that he was gone. It was so _cruel_ and I didn’t know why I said it but I couldn’t stop. I looked him dead in the eye and I said _you are going to die, broken and afraid and no one will care because you never lived a life worth living. You’ve been half in the grave your whole life. And soon, very very soon, you’ll finally be all the way in it._

He started crying and I… I hadn’t realized how tired I was, until suddenly I wasn’t. I was finally awake, and I could feel the blood stopping it’s steady drip. I got into my flat with a spare key I kept hidden under one of several potted plants and uh… he was there.

Arius Pantazis was sitting on my couch, dressed in a nice suit, and reading a book. He noticed me and congratulated me on getting out of my grave by myself. He had been starting to wonder if he needed to come get me. And then he started… explaining things, I guess. I don’t know. I was still getting used to the cold and my mind was buzzing with electricity from what I’d done outside. I couldn’t really focus on what he was saying.

But I do know he said I’m an avatar. I serve something called Terminus, an entity of death and the end of things. I need to feed it or it will feed on me. Reasonable enough, I guess. Maybe I’ve been serving it my whole life and just never knew it.

Well. Arius told me to _eat the fear of death_ off of people and respect my new god before dipping out without even giving me a chance to ask him if that’s his real name. It really seems like a fake name. He said something about there being other entities too, to look out for their followers. Don’t always play nice or something. But again, I was hardly in a position to be paying attention.

I did know I couldn’t stay in my flat though. It was luck that my family hadn’t cleared it out yet. I grabbed a bag and packed as many clothes as I could, a few other things. But I left a lot of stuff that I miss. Important things that I just didn’t have the room for.

You know what else was really lucky? My family also hadn’t closed my bank account yet. So I was able to withdraw some cash from a few ATMs. 

Then I skipped town and headed here. I don’t know why I chose London. I guess I just thought… it’s far enough away that no one who knew me is gonna spot me but close enough that I don’t feel like I’ve completely abandoned my family.

Now I’m just… living life as a dead person. I’m pretty sure I’m Owen Harper dead. From Torchwood? Anyway, I have a really nice roommate who knows my situation and we actually uh… she’s really nice, is the point. And I’m looking for a new job so I’m not completely reliant on her once my money runs out. I think I’m living a pretty normal life… if you ignore the whole, uh, eating fear thing. I’m mostly used to it. It’s chill.

I mean— it’s not. Of course it’s not. I _died_. I’m _dead_ and I can never see my family again and I have to _eat fear_. And I keep! Zoning out! Like, no thoughts total brain dead zoning out. Like my body is forgetting I’m technically still alive. None of this is okay. But it’s my life now, as much as you can call it one. I have to push through this and manage. I have to believe I’m gonna be okay. It’s going to be okay. It has to be.


End file.
